I was actually looking at it today at work. A couple of pictures on the back of the box kind of threw me off the purchase.

There's a screenshot of a guy with lots of little red crosshairs all over him. Yes, I imagine it's just a system where you target individual body parts. The only game I know of that's ever done that right was eternal darkness. That was slick and unobtrusive. From the that shot on the box it's pretty silly looking in this game.

Okay, I caved in and bought it (XBox version) and have played it a few hours. I'll agree with most of the reviews when they say it's a decent game, but not a great game (so far, anyway).

+ Great atmosphere. It really looks, feels, and sounds like those old spaghetti westerns. There are a couple of "Weird West" things I've seen so far, like fighting midget clowns and a weird science moment, but that doesn't bother me.

+ Graphics are passable, there's good fluid animations and I haven't noticed any framerate drops.

- Computer AI seems to be pretty lacking. Sometimes they'll take cover and act how they should, other times they'll be standing a few feet away from you just wandering around. More often than not, they go down easy.

Gameplay is OK. Nothing too spectacular here. The "dead-eye" mode is pretty cool. Red, the main character's "dead-eye" mode is to go into a time slowdown aka Max Payne style bullet time. That hasn't been too useful since most of the enemies haven't posed much of a threat so far. I've gotten to a second playable character, and his dead eye ability is much more useful.

There's a lot of unlockable stuff. In a level, two things can become unlocked. If you do "Good", one becomes unlocked. Do an "Excellent" job and you get both. You collect money (bounties) by killing baddies which you can buy to repair your weapons or unlock more stuff.

From what I've played so far, I'm happy with it. If you like the Old West, you'll probably like it although I'm not sure if it's a $50 price tag is justified (definitely $40) so you might want to wait until you can find it for few dollars less.

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"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" -VoltaireXBL gamertag: NthPowr